I've read over a few threads about the potential risks of upgrading from Mate 1.2 to Mate 1.4, but haven't found anyone report any problems. There aren't many threads on this so I thought I would ask. It was my understanding that the first phase of Mate was mainly conversion of names and dependencies to prevent issues with Gnome3. This would mean that Mate 1.4 should be as compatible as Gnome 2.3x was. I've used the instructions below to upgrade a test install on a virtual machine and it seems to have gone smoothly.

If you have upgraded your Mint 13 Mate system to Mate 1.4, have you had any issues? Has it gone smoothly? FYI, I'm running 64bit.

I installed Linux Mint 13 MATE 64 bit as my main installation a week ago. I've upgrading to 1.4 immediately after install, and it has been rock solid stable for me all week. Worthy successor to Linux Mint 11 GNOME 2, as the bugs I was having daily on GNOME 2 have all been address in MATE

The instructions given are correct. To shorten that post a bit, here are the four commands you need to run.

Note that you'll see some warnings that packages can't be authenticated. You can ignore those warnings, and it only applies to the installation of the mate-archive-keyring package. After that has been installed, the keyring is on your system to authenticate packages from the MATE repository with.

You might also want to install the mate-desktop-environment meta package, to bring in some new MATE components. It will install some additional backgrounds and themes, and give you the ability to send and receive files over bluetooth.

Thanks Vincent. Concerning the mate-desktop-environment meta package, any idea why this wouldn't have been installed to begin with since this version of Mint uses Mate by default? I've installed it on my test machine with no problems.

If anyone else has some feedback on their experience, I would love to hear about it.

Probably because it pulls in MATE artwork and themes, and on Linux Mint you get Linux Mint artwork and themes The other packages this would install on MATE 1.2 already are installed on Linux Mint. With MATE 1.4 the new bluetooth package from MATE is the one you would be missing on Linux Mint (in addition to the artwork and themes). The MATE themes don't look very nice IMHO with Gtk+ 3 applications, but I've read that with MATE 1.6 (currently in the works) there will be new themes with also better support for Gtk+ 3 applications.

I'm happy with the default Mint theme, though I can't say I've seen an example of a GTK3 app yet to evaluate how it looks. Mint-meta-mate is another package that seems curiously missing or rather not installed. Everything it brings in is already installed, and it is "mint flavored" so to speak. Just thinking out loud.

My main concern is longevity, I'm over the days of reinstalling every 6 months (which I did from 2006 to 2009. I ran Lucid for 3 years and just now moved to Mint 13 Maya Mate because I could not make myself like Unity (or Gnome Shell for that matter). I may like Cinnamon once it matures a bit, but Mate is incredibly comfortable and productive for me right now. I'm very glad to see the project alive.

The mint-meta-mate is thankfully correctly named; it is a meta package. That is, it's only purpose is for the developers to easily pull in all the packages they have selected to the Linux Mint MATE edition when they are mastering the ISO file. As you replace or remove some default applications, usually you quickly also lose the meta packages as you remove something those packages depend on. The meta packages serve no further purpose after having installed Linux Mint, so no harm done that it is not there. (Of course the packages also serve the purpose of adding all the needed packages to a different edition of Linux Mint, if you want to add the MATE to it.)

I upgraded to Mate 1.4 last night and didn't notice any immediate problems.

One caveat for anyone who wants to do this: the mate repository is (currently) SLOW. We're talking almost dial-up-internet slow. It took over 20 minutes to download all the packages. So go make yourself a cup of coffee when you start this. You'll have plenty of time to sit & drink it before you're done!

In my first introductory post, I noted that my test installation of Ubuntu12.04/Mate1.2 was trashed when I tried to remove all vestiges of Unity, both 2d and 3d.

I wiped that drive and reconfigured it, and since the setup, I have been running concurrent tests on both Mint/Mate and Ubuntu/Mate. I also have a third drive configured with Ubuntu, straight Unity, just for giggles, as it were.

I upgraded Mate to 1.4 on the Ubuntu/Mate setup pretty much the day Mate 1.4 was released. Worked okay for a short while, but then an Ubuntu X-server update ruined it. I left that one alone for a week or so, then found I had to boot up to Ubuntu/Gnome-Classic in order to get to any working desktop at all and run Ubuntu updates.

Long story short (maybe impossible for me), there were a ton of Ubuntu updates, mostly having to do with Open GL, X-server, Compiz, NVidia drivers. I keep all these test systems set to download "Proposed" and "Backports." I figure if I'm going to be testing buggy, I might as well test bleeding-edge and buggy.

After the first couple days of "fixes," Ubuntu/Mate became dramatically more stable. I was surprised -- and pleased. I didn't think they were working on it to that degree.

I upgraded the Mint/Mate to Mate 1.4 a week ago. Since Mint is behind Ubuntu on update schedules, Mint/Mate is not as clean and stable as Ubuntu/Mate has become. Ubuntu/Mate has become stunningly solid. I do expect that in a relatively short time Mint/Mate will catch up.

I have my desktop set up to run Compiz and Emerald Themes. I am semi-amused that when I paw around on Ubuntu forums, the consensus is that "Emerald sucks." Oh sure, it does. And we all love Unity. I on the other hand have collected, written and tweaked numbers of themes and am not inclined to throw them away. I do what I do. I like what I do. I don't really want be forced into something that I don't like to do.

Assuming, Vincent, that our little "Mate" community isn't so small it will disappear from disinterest (in which case, you and I will have to go back to baking our own bread from scratch, like maybe growing our own wheat, harvesting it, threshing it and grinding the grain...), then the Mate fork should be the worthy successor we all hope for.

Given the improvements over the past couple weeks, I'm actually quite excited about it.

Ah, I took the plain vanilla Ubuntu Unity drive and ran updates on it two days back: 300 of them. The machine rebooted, for some reason said it couldn't detect my graphics card (which I found very bizarre under the circumstances) and crapped out. Unity is just soooo cool.

Last edited by vermontbear on Sun Sep 16, 2012 8:44 am, edited 1 time in total.

Vincent Vermeulen wrote:I installed Linux Mint 13 MATE 64 bit as my main installation a week ago. I've upgrading to 1.4 immediately after install, and it has been rock solid stable for me all week. Worthy successor to Linux Mint 11 GNOME 2, as the bugs I was having daily on GNOME 2 have all been address in MATE

The instructions given are correct. To shorten that post a bit, here is what you need to do:

You might also want to install the mate-desktop-environment meta package, to bring in some new MATE components. It will install some additional backgrounds and themes, and give you the ability to send and receive files over bluetooth.

Thanks to those abbreviated instructions from Vincent, I have just installed 1.4 in less than half an hour and without insurmountable difficulties. Everything seems to be as it should be, although I have one error message from the Package Manager, about which I shall enquire in a separate post (it doesn't look very important).

I'm no expert at this sort of thing and used Vincent's instructions as the long ones on the Mate site were so forbidding. Thanks again, Vincent, a real mate!

Well, if you haven't used the procedure linked to the first post, and you instaled Mint 13 with Mate, you should have 1.2. But you could open the package manager from the menu and search for "mate-desktop" and see what version it is.

David Rahrer wrote:Well, if you haven't used the procedure linked to the first post, and you instaled Mint 13 with Mate, you should have 1.2. But you could open the package manager from the menu and search for "mate-desktop" and see what version it is.

A faster way: press Alt-F2, type mate-about, press Enter. Or run mate-about from the terminal if you have one open already.